(68) The abracadabrante story of Mooon Child

“The Dream is a second life. I have never been able, without trembling, to pierce those gates of ivory or horn that separate us from the invisible world. The first moments of sleep are the image of death; a nebulous numbness seizes our thoughts, and we cannot determine the precise instant when the self, under another form, continues the work of existence.
It is a vague underground passage that gradually becomes illuminated, where pale and gravely motionless figures emerge from shadow and night, inhabiting the realm of limbo. Then the scene begins to move, a new clarity illuminates and animates these strange apparitions…”

Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia or Dream and Life, in Les Filles du feu

I feel a gaze resting upon me. Who could be looking at me in this way? I know it in the same manner that beings trapped within dreams obscurely know that a foreign consciousness stands behind the landscapes they traverse. A presence… a face… I do not know. Perhaps an opening in the world. A silent attention weighing upon things without ever entirely touching them.
For a long time now I have walked within this circus. I speak of “walking,” yet the word itself remains unstable. For here no one walks as elsewhere. The ground itself hesitates. The beams slowly shift in the darkness before suddenly yielding to the vertigo that seizes them. The ropes breathe, the canvases swell like immense chests, and the red rocks where I was born sometimes seem to drift through the depths of the big top like islands carried upon an invisible sea. I know these rocks well. I know their warmth. I know the black veins running beneath their surface, the ancient burns frozen within their volcanic flesh. They are the last place that still preserves the memory of true support. Everything else floats.
Below me rise the flames that I now fear. They do not burn as the fire of men burns. They rise slowly, endlessly, with the patience of a plant or of smoke. I have always known them. They already crossed the belly of the circus before my birth. Sometimes I think they uphold the world; sometimes that they consume it. And the roaring sea answers them. I almost never see the ocean itself. Its waves rise into the depths of the circus. They strike at the bases of the fire with a heavy, ancient sound, like a sleeping breath. The entire big top sways between these two powers: that which seeks to rise and that which comes undone and longs to reclaim… and I stand between them.
For a long time I believed that this rope, which reminds me of those that once guided me and upon which today I know how to walk, had been stretched out in order to restrain me.
I still remember its former presence above me. It descended from the dark heights like a foreign will. I did not know who held it. Perhaps no one. Perhaps the circus itself. It followed me… or I followed it, my body perpetually hindered even before I knew how to speak. Each of my gestures already seemed written within its tension. Then one day something changed.
This rope could also carry.
So, cautiously, one foot after another, without trying to defy the void surrounding me, I stepped onto it. I only wished to know whether a line capable of constraining could also lead me toward that elsewhere for which I hoped. Since then I have remained suspended between two worlds: behind me the red rocks of the island, before me the shifting space of the big top where the flames rise toward a skyless smoke.
And while I advance, I sometimes feel that presence entering and leaving the circus, just as it enters and leaves my own self. It comes from very far away. Farther than the heights of the circus. Farther than these islands that bear us.
Farther even than the obscure belly where all this seems to have been built and abandoned.
At first the thought came to me that it might be the Leviathan… I know now that we live within something resembling an immense body. The beams support and crack like bones. The ropes vibrate like nerves. The red canvases hang like inner membranes beaten by invisible breaths. Everything here possesses an organic slowness. Yet within this shadow… that gaze does not belong to the monster. It comes from beyond the belly. At times it passes through me as a cold light might pass through deep water. Then the entire world subtly changes around me. The flames grow taller. Silence returns and slowly deepens. The rocks seem to wait. And I myself become more real and more fragile at once. I could not say why, but it sometimes seems to me that this presence reads me. As though my life were advancing within a substance made of signs, gestures, and images assembled in a darkness I cannot entirely understand. Then a strange anguish seizes me: what if each of my crossings depended upon that distant gaze? And what if the world itself continued to exist because someone, somewhere outside the big top, persisted in turning the invisible pages of our night?
I sense within this unknown being a solitude perhaps akin to my own. He too seems suspended… as though caught within something greater than himself. Line after line… passing from one to another, in unstable balance, he attempts to grasp a meaning that still escapes me…
Sometimes I even have the terrible impression that he participates in the collapse of the circus simply by looking at me, as though every true attention secretly wears away what it loves. So I continue moving along the rope while he pursues his line… going back and forth… not in order to flee or conquer, but to keep open that strange distance between him and me, that distance through which he may still see me without entirely falling into the world in which I live, and through which I may still feel, above the belly of the Leviathan, the almost impossible presence of another.